Tempt the Stars
Page 14

Basically, I couldn’t tell him anything.
“I can’t tell you anything,” I said, knowing how well that was likely to go over. “I wish I could, but I can’t. I just need something that will get me through a forest of unknown demons and to the front door, long enough for someone to let me in. Do you have anything like that?”
Pritkin crossed his arms and glared at me. “Yes.”
Chapter Seven
“I didn’t mean you,” I said viciously, when we materialized in the middle of a dark, foggy field a few minutes later.
Pritkin was too busy scanning the area Special Ops–style to bother answering. Just like he hadn’t mentioned that he intended to grab me just as I started to shift. I should have figured it out when he suddenly got cooperative, but I’d been distracted trying to make the too-short emerald T-shirt he’d loaned me fit over my ass.
It wasn’t working that great.
I pulled it down again, wishing that he was taller or that I had a coat. It was chilly, and the thin tee wasn’t doing a lot to keep goose bumps from popping up. Or a couple of other things.
“Is it obvious that I’m not wearing a bra?” I asked nervously. I hadn’t given a lot of thought to what I would wear when I went to visit my parents, but a thin old T-shirt with nothing underneath wasn’t on the list.
“I . . . hadn’t noticed,” Pritkin told me.
I looked down at the offending mounds, which were straining the soft green cotton. And making a couple of points about my lack of underwear. “Do you think anyone else will?”
He glanced at me and then looked quickly away. “Well . . ”
“Well what?”
“They are a bit . . . jiggly.”
“Jiggly?” I looked down in horror. I wasn’t jiggly; I was too young to be jiggly. I bounced a little on my toes, and they moved, sure. But that was normal. Wasn’t it? “They’re not jiggly!”
“Perhaps it was a bad choice of word.”
“You’re damn right, it was!”
“I merely meant that they tend to sway a bit when you . . ”
“When I what?”
“Do anything, really.”
I sighed and hunched over. “Does this help?”
Pritkin didn’t say anything.
“Well?” I demanded.
“They’re a little . . . large . . . to be easily concealed by—”
“They’re not large!” I did not have large, jiggly boobs, damn it. I had nice, pert breasts. I’d always been proud of my breasts. I just didn’t want to flash the parents, that was all. “They’re the perfect size!”
“No arguments here.”
I stared at him, because coming from any other guy that would have sounded flirtatious. But Pritkin didn’t flirt. He did, however, pull off the hoodie he was still wearing and put it around me.
It was warm from his body and it smelled like him. And the fact that he was being an ass didn’t stop me from clutching it for a second, and the hands that were trying to zip it up, not wanting to let him go. Stop it, I told myself harshly. I was going to get him back. I was going—
“Where are we?” he asked softly.
I just looked at him silently for a moment. And then said what had to be said. “I’m taking you back.”
“No, you aren’t.”
“And how are you planning to stop me?” I looked pointedly down at his hands, which had tightened on the soft cotton of the hoodie. “By chaining me up? Because that doesn’t work so well.”
“No. By expecting you to use your brain. You said you need weapons—”
“And you have them. So hand ’em over!”
A lip quirked. “They are tools. I am the weapon. Without me they would do you little good.”
“I’ll take that chance!”
“No, you won’t,” he told me again, sounding certain. “You’re smarter than that.”
“If I was smarter, I’d have figured out some other way to do this!”
“Perhaps there is no other way.”
“Perhaps I’m losing my mind,” I muttered.
“It’s not so bad, once you get used to it,” he said, making me do a double take. Because Pritkin didn’t do funny, either. “Can you at least give me the general layout?” he added, before I could comment. As if we’d settled something.
And I guess maybe we had, since I automatically replied, “There was a parking lo—no. That came later. There should be a bunch of trees, like a small wood.”
Pritkin nodded at something behind me. “Those trees?”
I looked over my shoulder, and then turned around. The fog made sure I couldn’t see too well. Not even Tony’s house, which should be somewhere off to the right, assuming the gray lumps along the horizon were the trees in question. I couldn’t tell for sure, since I didn’t remember there being quite that many. And because my eyes weren’t interested in trees.
They were looking for patrols, one of the ones Tony always had messing about, and which could be gliding silently through the fog toward us right now. Although, if memory served, they’d spent most nights under the covered driveway out front, smoking and gossiping, since who the hell broke into a vampire’s stronghold anyway? Of course, Jonas and I had, but that would be years from now, after my parents were long dead. So even if it caused the patrols to be more vigilant afterward, it shouldn’t affect—
“Cassie?”
“I don’t know,” I said, trying to focus on the maybe-trees when my eyes wanted to look for vamps. Not that they’d see them. That was the problem. You never saw them . . . until they wanted you to. “I should probably mention that there’s a chance, um, that there might be somebody else around—”
“Somebody else?” Pritkin frowned. “You mean other than the demon army?”
“—so we should probably keep this quiet.”
“How quiet?”
I cringed slightly. “Like too-low-for-vampire-ears quiet?”
The frown tipped over into a scowl. “How many vampires?” he asked grimly.
“That would depend on how loud . . ”
Pritkin swore—quietly—under his breath.
“Can you do a silence spell?” I asked hopefully.
“No.” He started switching around some of the weapons in his holsters.
“But Jonas—”
Pritkin’s head came up.
“I mean, he could, or he said he could, uh, rig something—”
“Yet you didn’t bring him, did you?” Pritkin asked sweetly.
“He was . . . busy. . . ”
Pritkin shoved some more weapons into new holsters and muttered something that sounded like “smart man.”
“But if Jonas could do it,” I persisted. “You must be able—”
“It isn’t the spell that’s the issue,” I was told shortly.
“Then what?”
“Magic is linked with human energy.”
“So?”
“So human energy attracts demons!”
Well, shit.
Pritkin gestured at the lumps. “Are those the damned trees or not?”
I squinted. They looked a lot more ominous than the thin line I remembered, almost like a forest. But they were also the only ones in sight.
“Yes,” I said. “I think so. Maybe?”
Pritkin muttered something else. He was doing that a lot tonight. “Let’s go.”
It was the right group of trees. I could tell as soon as we got close enough to see the spears of light shining through the branches. It wasn’t moonlight—too bright and the wrong color—more like firelight or soft electric. But the mostly oaks with a scattering of white pine made it impossible to be sure, since I couldn’t see the house.
And what I could see, I didn’t like.
The weird lighting caused strange crisscrossing shadows to fall everywhere, turning the area under the trees into a half-lit maze. A foggy, half-lit maze, with the light beams sifting apart, like the eerie, otherworldly illumination UFOs gave off in the movies. I swallowed, suddenly really wishing for a Scully from The X-Files—some thoroughly prosaic presence to inform me that everything in life had a nice, comforting, scientific solution.
Of course, she’d gotten knocked up by some alien, hadn’t she? So maybe it was just as well that my companion was more like Mulder. A coked-out Mulder with a lot of weapons, who knew that the monsters under the bed were real and would gut you.
Pritkin was certainly looking more than usually cautious. Or maybe he just didn’t like fighting something he couldn’t even name. Whatever the reason, he stopped at an outlying oak, standing like a vanguard a dozen yards in front of the rest, and pulled the weird, big-barreled gun I’d seen at Dante’s.
“What is it?” I asked, suddenly tense. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t sense anything.”
“But . . . that’s good, right?” I asked, watching him spin open the cylinder like an old-fashioned revolver.
“That’s good if your information was wrong,” he told me grimly, shoving some weird bullets from a leather case into place. They looked like tiny potion vials, with different-colored liquids sloshing against the transparent sides. I didn’t know how something that looked so delicate would survive being fired from a gun, but then, I guessed they weren’t actually made of glass. “How sure are you?”
“Pretty sure.”
“Then it’s not so good,” Pritkin said dryly.
“Meaning?”
“One of two things. Either there are no demons in there . . ”
“Or?” I prompted, because he’d trailed off to scan the tree line again.
“Or we’re dealing with something old enough and powerful enough to shield itself from detection—even in numbers.”
I tried to fit my spine a little more snugly into the unyielding bark behind me. “So . . . that would be bad.”